OP-EXTRA: SELECTIONS FROM OPINION ONLINE

Published: November 30, 2008

HEADING HOME Growing up, I didn't have the story of picking up my glove and tossing a baseball with my father. He was in his 40s when I was born and, because of a chronic neck problem, limited in his sports activities. I remember my dad sitting in a chair with some water-bag contraption, trying to alleviate some of the pain. Most of my early baseball memories involve my big brother Ken dragging me out in the rain to play, and my parents supporting from afar.

From what my parents told me, my brother could not wait to have a playmate when I was born. He knew that a little brother has no choice but to follow along with whatever big brother has planned. We are seven and a half years apart, but he competed with me as if I were his age -- very little mercy and high expectations. He gave me my competitive spirit.

By the time I could identify letters and read a little, Ken was ready with his trusty blue scorebook, which contained his grand plan to make me a Major League Baseball player. First I was to learn Wiffle ball, then stickball, then play in a local neighborhood league (I was supposed to be a key cog in the engine of the Cadmus Court Killers), then it was on to the ''cerebral'' by learning the rules of Strat-O-Matic baseball.

By the way, all of this was supposed to happen before I played Little League.

-- Doug Glanville,

''A Big-League Brother''

THINK AGAIN What the neo-conservative critics of the academy are worried about is not professors who stray from their narrowly defined areas of expertise; they are worried about professors who do so in order to sneak in their partisan preferences under the cover of providing students with supplementary materials. That, I think, is a genuine concern, and one Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post, in their new book, ''For the Common Good,'' do not take seriously enough.

Finkin and Post maintain that there is nothing wrong, for example, with an instructor in English history ''who seeks to interest students by suggesting parallels between King George III's conduct of the Revolutionary War and Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq.''

But we only have to imagine the class discussion generated by this parallel to see what is in fact wrong with introducing it. Bush, rather than King George, would immediately become the primary reference point of the parallel, and the effort to understand the monarch's conduct of his war would become subsidiary to the effort to find fault with Bush's conduct of his war. Indeed, that would be immediately seen by the students as the whole point of the exercise. Why else introduce a contemporary political figure known to be anathema to most academics if you were not inviting students to pile it on, especially in the context of the knowledge that this particular king was out of his mind?

-- Stanley Fish, ''An Authoritative

Word on Academic Freedom''

Reader Comments:

Why teach the history of George the Third at all unless it is to develop the ability of students to make competent moral and political judgments about the affairs of their own times?

-- Posted by Robert Doane

THE WILD SIDE This month, the woolly mammoth came back. Into the news, that is. For it has had its genome sequenced, and is the first extinct animal to have that distinction.

The sequence is a draft -- for technical reasons, parts of it are likely to be inaccurate -- and it is not yet complete. But that didn't stop joyous speculations about the prospects for the mammoth's resurrection.

And I have to say, I love this stuff. I adore thinking about the science that would need to be done to bring back an extinct species, be it a mammoth or a glyptodon, a dodo or a Neanderthal.

The normal way to get a new genome into a blank egg is to take a single cell from the animal you want to clone, and fuse it with the egg. The nucleus of that single cell then becomes the nucleus of the egg. But with a mammoth, this almost certainly won't work. Because mammoth carcasses have been lying around for 10,000 years or more, their cells aren't in good shape and their genomes are shattered. Instead of being neatly arranged in chromosomes, as ours are, mammoth genomes are in tiny pieces. So before we could put a mammoth genome into an egg, we would have to build one -- something we are nowhere close to being able to do. Woolly mammoths will not be coming soon to a zoo near you.